This is a cool way to protect a belief, narrowing the scope so that the refuting data do not apply anymore. Perhaps I can write a fucking essay about it, but do you have data to support this narrowing move? There is like a ton of data that the West has been invasively spying of possible threats to the status quo (from Cointelpro to undercover UK cops like recently), not just people “acting on it”. Furthermore, actions can fall under protected free speech as well, like putting up a poster, demonstrating, and protesting. So your proposal is inherently undemocratic if you roll back freedom to only protect oral expression, quite similar to a “Don’t ask don’t tell” attitude towards gay people. What you just said is simply counter-factual. Blanket surveillance is a staple of Western societies in the 21st century, and it blows my mind that there are still people oblivious to what is more or less spelled out clearly in the Patriot Act and all laws modeled after it across the globe.

In good faith, folk: Is this the most suitable community for your content?

I’m going to bring it up.

Isn’t this the same asshole who posted the “Woke racist” meme as a response to Gemini generating images of Black SS officers? Of course we now know he was merely triggered by the suggestion because of his commitment to white supremacy and alignment with the SS ideals, which he could not stand to see, pun not intended, denigrated.

The Gemini ordeal was itself a result of a system prompt; a half-ass attempt to correct for white bias deeply learned by the algorithm, just a few short years after Google ousted their AI ethics researcher for bringing this type of stuff up.

Few were the outlets that did not lend credence to the “outrage” about “diversity bias” bullshit and actually covered that deep learning algorithms are indeed sexist and racist.

Now this nazi piece of shit goes ahead and does the exact same thing; he tweaks a system prompt causing the bot to bring up the self-serving and racially charged topic of apartheid racists being purportedly persecuted. He does the vary same thing he said was “uncivilizational”, the same concept he brought up just before he performed the two back-to-back Sieg Heil salutes during Trump’s inauguration.

He was clearly not concerned about historical accuracy, not the superficial attempt to brown-wash the horrible past of racism which translates to modern algorithms’ bias. His concern was clearly the representation of people of color, and the very ideal of diversity, so he effectively went on and implemented his supremacist seething into a brutal, misanthropic policy with his interference in the election and involvement in the criminal, fascist operation also known as DOGE.

Is there anyone at this point that is still sitting on the fence about Musk’s intellectual dishonesty and deeply held supremacist convictions? Quickest way to discover nazis nowadays really: (thinks that Musk is a misunderstood genius and the nazi shit is all fake).

Of course, this goes without saying. People fight for prisoners’ conditions right here and now in the belly of capitalism. People support improvement of working conditions and compensation right here and now.

This is in fact in the heart of anarchosyndicalism. I don’t remember when it was the last time I heard that “I do not support X (worker unions, incarcerated rights, homeless people, etc) because they are reformist, and X’s (workers’, prisoners’, homeless people’s) problems will automatically vanish when we reclaim the means of production”.

This is like the quickest way to lose your friends in the anarchist movement. But replace those terms with “women/black/gay/trans” rights and the same incredibly void argument suddenly gains traction lmao. Then there are the edge cases, like trans people are more likely to be unemployed, homeless, and/or incarcerated.

So this is outright hypocrisy, because if you frame the question as “anarchist support for prisoners” they go “yay!”, but if you frame it “anarchist support for trans women” some go “meh”. Well assholes, a trans woman is more likely to become a prisoner, and at that she is more likely to get stripped of her humanity and dignity. So, although there are so many other problems scourging the anarchist movement, I believe in the 21st century an intersectional analysis is essential, an analysis according to which being multiply classed into oppressed groups has a cumulative effect, that can lead to extreme marginalization and even loss of health, and life.

Compared to that even the unskilled blue collar worker of the “ethnic majority” (as per the linked articles terminology) can be seen as privileged, in other words let’s make sure that all human beings can have at least the standard of living that they can be exploited for their manual labor, before we say that all issues are labor versus capital dialectics.

And that having been said, better not get started on American exceptionalism and privilege extending to trans issues as well. There are trans people in Africa, Middle East, South America, and everywhere else, where the stakes are life or death, not whether you get hormones before or after puberty. There are so many people who will just say “this is just so fucked up, there is no point in discussing it, say, about trans rights in Egypt, for instance”.

All these headlines we read about the christian nationalist crackdown on trans rights have a silent part that reads “in America”. There have been tragic crackdowns on trans people in other places and even the trans-focused media won’t write much about.

Don’t get me wrong folks. The intersectional analysis is essential to include feminist, POC, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ voices into anarchism and unionism. But it also has to be internationalist, and have less of a First World constitutional democracies bias. This fits in well with an internationalist humanist understanding of anarchism, that sees human dignity as inalienable, regardless of national borders. At least this is the version of anarchism I grew up with.

It reminds me something Noam Chomsky said in an interview. The media are designed so the principles of the system never gets questioned. The so called liberal media, which Trumpists nowadays consider as “radical left”, are just the most left extreme of an extremely right-wing landscape, which is entirely manufactured. In other words, criticizing exploitation is left out of the discussion completely. “Identity politics” and “equal opportunity” is the only way the media will discuss about minorities, because it perpetuates the myth of individual merit and achievement. Collective oppression and collective action are deliberately outside the public discourse, because it challenges the cornerstone of system justification. This is the long and short of it. If you go back to the roots of racism, you will find exploitation. If you go back to the roots of sexism, you will find exploitation. When too many people in legal studies look too deep into this type of thing, it is time to move the window further right: they then crack down on academia.

Oh you big snowflake, you might not originate from the specific region of Bavaria, but you are a eugenicist, transphobe, technofascist, great replacement theory subscriber, who thinks that Western civilization is in danger because of brown trans people, and use your corporatist power to back an extreme neoliberal government of racists and Christian nationalists, who want to replace the rule of law with institutionalized white supremacy. “Nazi” does not even begin to describe the kind of heinous dumb fuck you are, but fear not: you will have lots of opportunities to catch up on history classes in the re-education camp pal.

Oh snap. Fixed it.

Actually resistance in concentration camps is an untold saga. The most famous example is the inverse “B” in “Arbeit Macht Frei”, but there where more examples, and less subtle too, like full blown antifascist banners in barracks, even sabotage and espionage in the gas chambers. Never give up!

Ah, I get you. I myself thought the HXC logo with the X in a circle (which stands for hardcore) was Cyrillic for “sound”, or someone simply told me and I believed them.

This is correct, but there was a revival in the UK in the 1980’s. It was the latter that influenced the ska-punk genre.

There is a conceptual distinction: Encryption in transit vs. encryption at rest. You may send the packets encrypted to the server, but if they are not encrypted on the server’s file system, anyone can read them.

The real question is, why do you think governments make such a big fuss about citizens having access to military grade encryption?

There have been audits of e2ee implementations, and the algorithms used also have some objective properties. I don’t think that I have ever heard in cryptography discussions that backdoors are so widespread that the discussion is moot. I have only heard, time and time again, the opposite.

Even Apple, in this very occasion, opted to ditch the service rather than backdoor it, and in fact takes the UK to court over this. I think that the opinion that this is all for show is a tad wild, and not very well supported in this occasion.

Like every cryptology book starts with the adage “There is cryptography that prevents your little sister from reading your mail, and cryptography that prevents the government from reading your mail, and we will talk about the latter.”

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/02/23/three-questions-about-apple-encryption-and-the-u-k/

On the other hand, not all implementations are created equal. Telegram was recently under fire, and there is a lot of variance in e2ee implementations in XMPP clients, IIRC.

At this point you are allowed to put “George Soros” in scare quotes too. It is a good time to be alive. /S

Username tracks

OK now that arstechnica has written about it, shills might stop nagging in the comments about my titling. LMAO

The basic way to do this is you respond to these three questions: What am I trying to protect? From whom? What are they able to do to get there?

No shit. They are not the same thing, they are heavily overlapping adjacent sets of people. You draw the line at alt-right, you are left with less than 20% of Republican voters, but a 100% of MAGA hat-bearers. This distinction is more theoretical than practical.

It is one of these cases where that “OR” approaches a singular circle.

Note just to be sure, Mull is a different thing than Mullvad. What you wrote makes sense for Mullvad, but I am not so sure if this is the case with Mull, the mobile app.

I don’t think we understand very well the threat model here. Are we talking about having a Mozilla account or the web engine itself. If you have an account they will probably start doing mining shit with it. What about activists researching certain topics then? The content browsed can be visible to Mozilla if they use their account for syncing bookmarks. That should be a dealbreaker right there. No different than Meta user-profiling the fuck out of your engagement behaviors. Now if this is NOT the case and you haven’t a Mozilla account, I assume that the version of the web engine available back at the time of the fork is exactly the same. So far so good.

The problem is that browsers are hard, and there is a ton of web protocols to be implemented, various fixes for security, support extensions and other QOL features. WORD ON THE STREET is that tasks like these cannot be undertaken as solo/hobby projects, that funding and an organization structure is essential. The teams behind LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc have a track record of already lagging behind Firefox’s version updates. Same goes with user-profile and configuration sets like Arkenfox (if I am not wrong). You may tweak the conf all you want, but if privacy and anonymity is compromised at the web engine level, these forks will be left with little to do about it. Then the only option will be to keep using an old version of the web engine (sacrificing security and quality of life extensions), or ditching the gecko web engine altogether.

That is why people are looking for genuine alternatives to the web engine.

I thought Mullvad was the best in anti-fingerprinting. Anyone can check their own configuration with EFF’s “cover your tracks” site.